I prefer his brother
Okay ladies and gents, let's just jump right into this. I'm pretty sure I have a lot to expound on about this asshole. You all seated and ready? Good.
After making your way down and through Brume Tower (an absolutely stunning, amazingly fun, mega frustrating, Demon's Souls-y area), you reach the bottom. The bonfire is called Lowermost Floor. It's a large circular room (with a small room off of it. This is where the bonfire is), filled with the familiar ash you've seen so much of so far in this second DLC. There's two of those giant warrior that pop out from under the ash here, but they don't have to be bothered with. When you first walk into the room, the boss fog gate is straight ahead, with the bonfire to the right a ways. There's a large thing (I've read that it's a giant corpse you fight the boss in. I never noticed, but that's pretty damn awesome. You can read the small thread on gamefaqs about it here) in the middle of the room (where the fog gate is), and surrounding it are four of those ashen idols. Before fighting the boss, you don't know what they would do to aid him, but it's made pretty apparent that if you leave them, they will help the boss in some fashion, considering all four are butted right up against his room. Hopefully you have enough Smelter Wedges to take care of them (amazingly, I did). So, with idols vanquished, you walk up to the fog gate, and--sigh--you step inside.
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| And with any luck, you'll get a message rated |
This is what the room looks like when you first step in. The boss doesn't appear immediately, which is great. It gives you time to use a buff on your weapon (avoid fire, bleeding, and poison. They are useless. Magic or lightning is the way to go). I wonder if that sword has anything to do with whatever might be in this room? Let's walk towards it, shall we?
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| Oh, it does. Who knew? |
When you get about halfway to the sword, black mist swirls around it, and a large knight appears to grab it from the ground. He thrusts it high, the name "Fume Knight" appears at the bottom of the screen, and then the fight is on, and you're in for a royally fucking tough battle.
First, briefly, his appearance. It's kind of a bummer to see another knight-holding-a-sword boss, but this one is better than maybe all the other ones before him. He's totally clad in armor, and none of his skin is visible. He's got a tattered skirt (?) kind of thing, and he's a very bland, bluish-grayish kind of color. Finally, he wields a smaller, normal sword in his right hand (just a normal longsword maybe), and a ridiculous greatsword in his left. The sword he takes from the ground, duh.
Okay, down to the nitty-gritty. Almost ALL of his attacks are just sword swipes, so the name of this game is dodging. The timing is a little wonky at first, but the more you fight, the more you get his pattern. This fight has two parts, and I'll start, logically, with the first. He swings both the small sword and the great sword in a number of different ways. He'll swing the small sword anywhere between one and three times (the three combo ends in a thrust), and sometimes this is followed by a sweeping attack with the greatsword, but not always. He will also occasionally rush at you from afar and try to pierce you with a thrusting attack. Finally, he'll swing the greatsword overhead or sweep it in front of him. Note that he'll sometimes use either sword to do a little half-sweep at his side if you stay too close to him. Secondary note: you absolutely can take damage on the back swing of his greatsword. Just keep that in mind.
He takes a few tries to get his first-half pattern down (it did for me, at least). Soon though, you realize he's not too bad. Don't even try to use a shield to block any of his attacks though. It's a waste of time. He'll cut your stamina down (especially with that greatsword) to nothing, and he'll combo you to death. Generally, I would roll backwards away from the small sword swipes, then roll under his greatsword sweeps, and to the side of his overhand slams. It's a little scary at fist rolling into this greatsword hand, but that's the easiest way to avoid its attacks. A thing about that greatsword: it has a crazy long reach. It's deceptively long. I couldn't even count the amount of times I thought I rolled out of the way enough, only to take damage anyway. It's very frustrating. You think you're far enough away, but you're not. Also, whenever he either hits you, or the ground (in the case of his overhand swing), his greatsword glows orange for a period, before going back to normal. I don't think this does anything other than to intimidate and foreshadow the second phase of the battle...
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| You know what they say about knights with big swords, right? |
When his health gets down to roughly half, he starts the second phase of the battle. He'll put his smaller sword away, and raise the greatsword up high. It then catches fire, and stays on fire for the remainder of the battle. It's not just fire though, I wanna say it's dark-fire, because it's tinged black (and I guess the Gyrm Greatshield doesn't negate the damage from the flame sword). Admittedly, it looks awesome.
Okay, once the sword is fired up, he has some new moves. He'll still slash and thrust with the sword, but he also has two new attacks. The first is a looooooong swipe with it, from his right to his left. The range on this is INCREDIBLY, IMPOSSIBLY LONG! If you thought the range on his greatsword normally was bullshit, well you might as well put the controller down. However, this attack is actually quite easy to dodge. You need to be patience, because the timing really is key, but once he starts bringing the sword from his side to the front, just roll towards it, to his sword hand. You'll take no damage, and have a nice opening to get a hit or two off. His other new attack is an AoE deal where he sticks the sword in the ground for a short moment, then black fire explodes from it. Obviously staying far away is how to dodge it, but even then, it releases swirling fireballs. It's unexpected at first, but all you have to do is roll between them, and it's pretty easy to dodge them.
Once I got down the patterns he used for the first part of the battle (the non-fire portion), I actually found it pretty easy. I would still get killed occasionally from dumb mistakes, but mostly I could get him down to that half health line. If this was the whole battle, I would have been able to beat him in a dozen or so attempts. Every time he set that sword on fire, something inside my brain broke. It was probably the chains holding my fear in place. Once that fire came, I was intimidated beyond all get-out. Essentially, his attacks are about the same as before he has the fire sword, but for whatever reason I just could not consistently dodge them. In all my attempts (including the times I died as a phantom helping other people), probably 75% of the deaths came because I got cut down by that goddamn fire sword. Maybe the timing is just a little different compared to the greatsword, pre-fire. At any rate, once he buffed himself, the countdown was on. The countdown for me to get killed and uber-frustrated that is (do the kids still use uber? Remember THAT phase? It wasn't very phat at all...).
How did I beat him? Take a goddamn guess. Yeah, I had to summon help. Even with summon help, it still took about a baker's dozen tries, or more. I will say, he has a gigantic amount of health normally, and this is increased when phantoms are present. I wouldn't go into this battle with more than one phantom, because than his health is just absurdly high, and this makes it monumentally more difficult. You can again summon the ever-resilient Steelheart Ellie (who is basically useless. Who knew?). Carhillion of the Fold is also available to summon, but I didn't use him, so I'm not sure how helpful he is, although I hear he isn't very, considering Fume Knight has a high resistance to magic spells. Eventually, I beat him with another human phantom. I was at the boiling point of violent frustration, too. I sent the person who helped me a thank you message. If I could have, I would have sent them some nudes or something. Errr, um, anyway, enjoy a picture:
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| No, not a nude pic! Just a pre-getting-run-through pic! |
I'm gonna jump into the tiniest bit of spoiler-y lore right now, so if that will offend your sensibilities, look away now!
This is actually Raime, one half of Vendrick's dual-advisers team, as it were. The other half, of course, was Velstadt. This is pretty interesting, here. What's even more interesting is that if you enter his room wearing Velstadt's helmet, he instantly buffs his sword with fire, instead of waiting until his health is drained to the 50%-60% mark. This provides some insight as to exactly how vile the relationship between Raime and Velstadt must have become.
Okay, spoiler stuff done. I think this whole post is just about done. I'll try to wrap things up with a classic summary. This was one of the most difficult bosses in all of Dark Souls II, and hell, probably in the whole series. As you'll see from my death count, I died WAAAAAY more on him than on any other boss in the game. Despite him being another knight boss, I ultimately think he's a great boss to the series. He looks cool, has a great back story, and is extremely difficult. Anyone that can beat this guy solo, well, I tip my hat to you and offer you this virtual handshake. I should have the overview post on the DLC up soon, followed by the other two boss posts. In a perfect world, all three of those posts would be up by Friday, but that's just not a possibility. Anyway, thanks for reading!
Times I died: 46 (!!)
Difficulty: 9.7/10
Rating: 9/10
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